Wordpress Plugins

Flowplayer is the definitely popular free open source Flash player. And I have received a question if it’s possible to use the first frame of the video as the splash image but without loading the full movie.

I tried to search the solution myself when I first developed Hana FLV player. I remember that all the players had the capability to display the first frame of video , but the problem was that they were downloading the complete movie even if the video is not set to be played automatically. So the file was silently downloaded in the background even when the user was not watching the video. And that could be a big bandwidth waste if the video file is big in size. So at that time, I was trying to solve this problem by implementing an option to define a splash image file. But it was another manual job that everybody hated including me.

Now, I did spend quite time researching on this issue. I had some hints from the Flowplayer forum, and here is the long waited solution!

This only works with Flowplayer v3 (player=”4″). Once it initiates the download , it will stop buffering after 1 second. If you want to increase the 1 second delay, change ‘1000’ to something else. It’s in miliseconds. So you should multiply the delay seconds by 1000. For example, 5 seconds would be 5000. It means, the video data will be downloaded for 5 seconds.

Copy below tag into your post and do some testing . Let me know if you have any questions.

Are you familiar with Google Webmaster Tool? If you are not, please take time to register Google Webmaster Tool first. Why ? Because it’s the valuable tool that will show you how Google crawls and indexes your site. By simply registering your domain, you can notify Google to start indexing your new website. You can maintain multiple websites as many as you want. It’s free. Also, It will show you the errors occurred while crawling, so you can easily find out why your site is not being indexed.

Now before you submit your website, it is important to generate sitemap. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines (not only Google) about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It is made of XML file listing all the files in your website indicating their importance (priority) and change frequency.

Here is a sample Sitemap XML file.

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="UTF-8"?><urlsetxmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://wpmarketing.org/</loc><lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>1.0</priority></url><url><loc>http://wpmarketing.org/privacy-policy/</loc><lastmod>2009-10-14T04:40:51+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq><priority>0.6</priority></url><url><loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/10/top-5-wordpress-plug-in-for-internet-marketing-all-in-one-seo-pack/</loc><lastmod>2009-10-13T12:28:17+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.4</priority></url><url><loc>http://wpmarketing.org/2009/08/fighting-adblock/</loc><lastmod>2009-10-13T04:58:18+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.2</priority></url><!-- cutting off . It's too long to show here --><url><loc>http://wpmarketing.org/about/</loc><lastmod>2009-08-05T12:08:20+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq><priority>0.6</priority></url></urlset>

Basically, it is not that difficult to create the file, but tedious and lots of labor may be involved if done by hand manually. Especially for the blog site with frequent article posting, you will need a plug-in for that which would update the Sitemap automatically. So here is Google XML Sitemaps plug-in.

Basically his plug-in will create a XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It will include all the WordPress pages and posts and even external pages that you defined. The sitemap is automatically updated whenever you modify any page or post, so it’s just convenient. It also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com automatically. You can’t ask for more.

It works pretty well right after the activation, but it is possible that you may need to create a file named sitemap.xml and/or sitemap.xml.gz in your WordPress root path and make them writable by webserver (If you are using Hosting providers with up-to-date system, you wouldn’t have problem). And the default settings are good enough so you should not do anything else. But if you want to rebuild the sitemap, click on the ‘rebuild the sitemap manually’ link marked with Red box in the above image.

By default, Google XML sitemaps is automatically calculate the priority of each posts using the comment count of the posts. If you want to custom define the priority, you can select ‘Do not use automatic priority calculation’ option in the ‘Post Priority’ group box.

Have you wondering why your blog’s traffic does not increase at all even if you spend time and posted quality articles? If you are trying to start WordPress blog, you absolutely need to have below plug-ins installed before starting Internet Marketing. So you do not waste any of your valuable time.

1. All in One SEO Pack : SEO is important. It’s the most important part of the website maintenance. and the most difficult. Main SEO tasks consist of managing title tag, and keyword and description meta tag. Especially I think title tag and description meta tag are important. ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in make it very easy to maintain out of the box. You can define title , keyword, and description not only for your blog but for every articles using the article’s content. You can specifically define them manually or the plug-in will automatically generate them using tags and categories. This is the most popular plug-in for SEO.

Once activated you will need to update the settings in the ‘All in One SEO’ sub menu under Settings. You will need to select enable and fill out the Home Title, Description, and Keywords. For the other options, you can just use the default settings.

I think more important feature is that you can define individual settings per post. Without this feature, a WordPress blog will have the same keyword and descriptions throughout all the sub pages. That’s really terrible for the SEO.

There are other numerous SEO plug-ins in the WordPress website. ‘Headspace’ is another popular SEO plugin-in, but it’s a little bit more complicated than ‘All in One SEO’.

I highly recommend ‘All in One SEO’ and you will see the results right away if your website has not been SEO optimized before. I had an experience that the traffic was increased about 20% after the plug-in installation. Be patient, the traffic increase was started about a week later.

Hosting Service Tip

Thinking of getting Wordpress Hosting? Then choose Hostgator. Make sure you select the shared hosting account - Baby package . It's the most affordable and fully featured package. You can even host multiple domains with the same account.

Hostgator provides the best environment for PHP application (64 MB of PHP memory) and stable system. I am using other hosting services, but Hostgator is the best. Link Directly to Shared Web Hosting Page